It would be nice if we could get a constitutional amendment that would redraw all districts, regions, and precincts in simple squares and rectangles. It should ignore everything else. No favoritism. No gerrymandering. Nothing. If you can gerrymander in favor of one group then you can gerrymander in favor of another group. Take the control out of human hands. Just a simple algorithm. Once you hit either a certain number of people or a certain amount of land mass then that’s it. Make another zone. I’m tired of cheating.
And what say you of peer reviewed district drawing algorithms that are literally designed to minimize all provided sources of bias?
Something tells me when you hear the word “algorithm” you don’t think “math proof”, you think “recommendation”.
No matter how you slice things up you will be creating minority and majority voices. It may be that splitting up districts by population means there is no race based majority district or it makes it so urban voices have a majority in most if not all districts. If you slice by some geographic definition you’ll absolutely create districts with varying population sizes, giving certain people a larger voice at the state and national level.
In the end, just the decision of what a source of bias even is will likely have some bias to it. I’m not saying that we can’t make things better, but that there is no such thing as a perfect way to draw districts and at the end of the day just choosing which algorithm is used will benefit some people over others.
This is the nature of all science. All science is wrong, it’s just a matter of how far off it is. The goal is always to approximate the correct solution, always getting incrementally closer, knowing we will never hit it exactly.
But to argue “science can never be perfectly accurate, therefore we should throw out any attempt to and go with some other method instead” represents the core problem with democracy in the US.